Reading Apple Harddrives on PC?

[AndreasOberg]

Hi,

Does anyone have experience with reading Mac formated external harddrives on windows?
On site we offloaded everything to Mac formated harddrives but our main server is a PC so now I'm wondering the best way to deal with this in the future.

I tried MacDrive and Paragon in the past, but had VERY poor performance and some strange behaviours which made me not really trust them.

Some solutions:
- copy the files through network from mac->Windows
- Use Macdrive if its safe enough
- maybe in the future format the harddrives in Fat32 or ExFat, but in my experience they are not as safe to use.
- Use Windows on the laptops onsite in the future so we dont have to mix operating systems.

Cheers!!
/Andreas

 

[Eric Santiago]

I work in a mixed platform network and have no issues reading working files between Mac and PC.

Ive had years of experience with MacDrive and never an issue until you download some malicious files on your PC/Mac then into another PC.

I also use ExFAT and that seems to work flawless.

What kind of issues are you having?

As far as RED ECO files I have not run into any issues to date other than the occasional corrupt R3Ds that come straight from the media.

 

[Stefan Scherperel]

I've been using MacDrive for years, the latest version, 10 has been perfect for me. No slowdown, you don't even realize that you are working off a mac formatted hard drive unless you look and see the little apple next to the drive icon. It has been an important and seamless implementation to my workflow and I can't recommend it enough. For $50, you really can't go wrong.

 

[Marc Wielage]

No issues with MacDrive here. And Paragon's NTFS for Mac also helps go the other way, when I have to read & write to an NTFS drive under Mac OSX.

 

[Nick Morrison]

+ 1 to MacDrive...been using it for years....

 

[Christoffer Glans]

I used ExFat but I've run into some issues over the years using them. I use Paragon's NTFS on Mac and Macdrive on PC, works perfectly. It works so great that I don't even know which drives that are NTFS and which are HFS+.

 

[AndreasOberg]

Good to hear guys that its working so good. The problems I had were:
- Speed
- strange things happened, this was 3 years ago so maybe its better.

I just felt it wasn't reliable, but if you guys use it then I will give it another shot.
/Andreas

 

[AndreasOberg]

I used ExFat but I've run into some issues over the years using them. I use Paragon's NTFS on Mac and Macdrive on PC, works perfectly. It works so great that I don't even know which drives that are NTFS and which are HFS+.

Hi Christoffer. I read up on ExFat but I was not encouraged when I read how it works. The other drives have much more security features built into them. They have backups on partition tables etc. ExFat does not have this, its mainly meant to be used for cameras and is not recommended to use like a hard disk. Sounds scary to me!

/Andreas

 

[Daniel Keywan Hollister]

While there are of course many ways to make a file system work across operating systems, there are definitely safer ways to do it than others. In order of preference:

1. NTFS drives using Paragon when needed. Paragon is great, but more importantly, NTFS is one of the most stable and understood file systems in existence. Disregard convenience for a second -- If you ever need to recover a drive (and it will happen someday) you will have a much easier time doing so with NTFS. Nearly every recovery tool can carve through it with high success. NTFS is also fairly resilient compared to other file systems to begin with, which is good, too.
2. HFS+. I don't love it (who does?), but similar to NTFS, it is well-studied and widely-supported. I've also seen very good performance running MacDrive -- we edited an entire show that way, 27TB of RED footage, never any damaging performance issues as a result of MacDrive. (No, this wasn't the intended plan, but it worked!)
3. FAT32. Yes, it has the 4GB file size limit, but most cameras split the clips for you now due to this. It's compatible across operating systems, and, to mirror my previous points, it's well-studied and pretty trivial to recover data from it if necessary.
4. exFAT. Oh, if only it were truly our saving grace. It works across operating systems and has no practical file size limit. Great, right? Well, performance isn't actually that great compared to either of the above choices (unless you're using it on a flash drive or SSD). But even worse, it is absolutely more susceptible to table loss/corruption from things like sudden unmounting or power surges. And then what do you do? Drumroll, please -- exFAT is a pain in the ass to recover data from. At least for now. Camera companies are starting to using it because they're also using flash memory, and because they know you're [hopefully] only using exFAT for that short distance between the camera and your [hopefully better!] storage solution.

Yeah, there are more convenient ways to do stuff, but it's not worth the loss of your data. Paragon and MacDrive are inexpensive and work well. Perhaps I'm a little paranoid, but I once came close to ending my career thanks to my naive use of exFAT a couple years ago. It's certainly just anecdotal, but it would be hard to dispute the stability and recovery probability of the other choices.

 

[AndreasOberg]

Very good information Daniel. I will copy and paste and save.
So you recommend using NTFS on all drives and just paramont on the Mac? And you get good drive speed from this as well? And then maybe HFS+ on the internal mac drives which are not mainly for storing, I guess?

Very useful to know. I really want to work in a mixed mac and PC environment. Sounds scary of the ending career part. Can you tell us more about this dramatic event?
/Andreas

 

[Subhadip Sen]

NTFS + Paragon is the way to go. Unless you have mostly Macs and just a couple Windows computers, in which case, HFS+ + Macdrive is a good option. I'm not up to date on the latest versions - does journaling work fully on Windows now?

I use ExFAT often and have never run into an issue. However, when it comes to hard drives with critical data, i.e. storing rushes, better stick to NTFS or HFS+. ExFAT was always designed for use with external flash storage. Checksumming instead of journaling is actually a benefit for slow flash storage and does result in a performance uplift.